Architectural Principles of Aldo Van Eyck

Hubertus House, Amsterdam – Aldo + Hannie Van Eyck, architects (photo from the Aldo+Hannie van Eyck Foundation website) 

My college professor Bill Kleinsasser greatly admired the Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck (1918-1999), whose interest in how people use and experience architecture he found entirely resonant with his own. Van Eyck is best known in architectural circles for being a co-founder of Team 10, a loosely affiliated group of European architects who advocated a humane form of urban planning during the post-war era. Bill developed a thorough understanding of Van Eyck’s work and writings, and he shared what he learned about Van Eyck’s architectural principles with his students. In particular, Bill appreciated the Dutch architect’s clear demonstrations of those principles in his built work, of which the Hubertus House (photo above) was a particular favorite. 

Despite Bill’s veneration of Van Eyck, I didn’t fully understand his enthusiasm for Van Eyck’s work during my University of Oregon days. Today—nearly four decades on—I’ve come to share Bill’s appreciation for the principles Van Eyck promoted. 

I excerpted the following from the 9^th edition of Bill’s self-published textbook Synthesis: 

Architectural Principles of Aldo Van Eyck

For years, Aldo Van Eyck’s architectural philosophy has espoused goals and concerns that are essential. Always humane (“. . . architecture need do no more, nor should it ever do less, than to provide BUILT HOMECOMNG), he has demonstrated again and again what his principles mean in built form. His buildings are showcases of applied architectural theory. It is a significant theory because it is centered on the feelings and perceptions of the people who will use the spaces provided, on the immutable characteristics of people in general. More than most other architects, Aldo Van Eyck has developed an architecture that provides an informed, unsentimental, yet rich framework of opportunities for its users; therein is the significance of his work. 

Here are some of his general principles: 

• Make places that haven’t got what they needn’t have (but do have what they need)—in both cases this is a lot, all sorts of things. 
• Make buildings that fit where they are put. 
• Identify each building with that same building entered, and hence with those it shelters, and define space—each space built—simply as the appreciation of it, including what should never be excluded but paradoxically usually is: those entering it. 
• Make each building an autonomous counterform of perpetual homecoming (like the shell to the mollusk). 
• Retain an intrinsic ambiguity (scope for multiple meaning). 
• Achieve labyrinthian clarity (ally of significant ambiguity, it harbors bountiful qualities). 
• Make place and occasion instead of space and time; make a welcome of each door, a countenance of each window, each place a bunch of places, each house a tiny city. 
• Emphasize what doesn’t change, has never changed (at no time can an architect be a prisoner of change). 
• Learn how others did it (a conscientious architect is freer than the fool who does whatever he/she likes or whatever enters his/her head). 
• Make places that are useful, gentle, cheerful, GOOD. 
• Offer multiple meaning in equipoise.

Here are some specific principles too, to facilitate implementation of the general ones: 

• Establish and reinforce connections to (awareness of) adjacent and surrounding features; that is, help people know and remember where they are by providing references. Be sensitive and respectful about how the connections are made. 
• Create internal references too—inner horizons-by letting the building itself (and people in it) be part of the view. 
• Use stairways, corridors, and entries to reveal (and vary) the inner horizons (to clarify and vitalize). 
• Inflect (adjust or vary), where differentiation is possible and appropriate (to articulate, thus to separate, but also to join). 
• Reveal certain essentials about the arrangement straight away (from the outside) and use entries, corridors, stairways, lifts, and views to continuing this clarifying, orienting, reassuring revelation. 
• Locate elements wisely: consider the experience of those who will use the space, use great empathy and testing (rehearsing) to determine which arrangements are best, remember other good places, and trust feelings (but not just feelings). 
• When there is more than one condition to support—and this usually the case—provide for multiple possibilities (avoid choosing one over another, your choice will inevitably be wrong). 
• Make bunches of places and articulate them. 
• Make the fixed structure in such a way that it may be read in many ways. 
• Create transparency—open everything up to reveal the whole. Let light come in and space go through but include enclosure in the opening up. Develop inner horizons as points of reference and security. 
• Make a complex perimeter (at the top as well as on the sides). Articulate the implied in-between (tight-rope dance along the building line). Make balconies, bays, roof gardens. 
• Extend entries inward and begin to enter far outward; think of each departure as entry. 
• Vary spatial depth and perceptible distance (extend lateral and vertical openings and articulate the elements along the views). 
• Vary positions of stairs, entries, windows, paths to shift views (positions) of inner and outer references (to complexify and to clarify). 
• Articulate each entry, stairway, and corridor to outline the organization of the whole, thus clarifying it. 
• Support a light framework on a heavy base, then heavy up the light framework (for instance with color) and lighten the heavy base (for instance with mirrors to break up its mass). The original two (base and framework) thus become multiple and the whole more complex. 
• Use details via Rietveld (details that explain what they do and how they were made). 
• Use color and structure to define elements. Avoid vagueness which destroys both part and whole. 
• Establish readable, relatable information about the building for each distance at which it is perceived. At no distance should the building go blank or be untrue. 
• Vary the building and the reference frames so that each person using the building will be able to find fitting, familiar conditions.